Sunday, 9 December 2012

KILLING THEM SOFTLY: GEORGE HIGGINS RETURNS ON FILM

Killing Them Softly
is only the second film to have been adapted from a novel by George
V. Higgins. As the first was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, which
is a classic, and that was almost 40 years ago, this raises the
simple question 'why?'. On the surface, Higgins' novels seem to
invite the transition to screenplay; they are written primarily in
dialogue, and in Killing Them Softly, just as in Eddie
Coyle, large chunks of dialogue are transferred from page to
screen virtually intact; forty years have not rendered Higgins'
characters or their talk obsolete. Perhaps it's because the dialogue tells so much of the story: Higgins' stories are generally being told by one character to another, with the reader listening in to a very Boston (and Irish) kind of recital. Indeed, Andrew Dominik's
adaptation of Cogan's Trade is set in 2008, in a place which
looks and lives a lot like post-Katrina New Orleans, but has Boston's
suburbs, and seems to be somewhere where everyone sounds like they're
from somewhere else, including Australia.

If Eddie Coyle were
a perfect little neo-noir, set in Boston's underground, Killing
Them Softly aspires to be more, and that may be part of the
reason it misses the bigger picture. For Dominik it's the set-up that
is the point; the initial robbery, of a mob's poker game, is not
quite an inside job, but includes the cynical framing of a hapless
victim who has once before tried an inside job. The frame is
engineered by a small-time grafter who hires two losers to pull off
the job. It nearly works, but it is destined, inevitably, not to
work. Jackie Cogan is the man sent in to set the balance right, his
trade being that of killer, and in Higgins' world, that balance is a
difficult equation, one that proves too difficult for Dominik.

You can see how in
bits of the film that are his, not Higgins', like the title. It comes
from Cogan's explaining why he likes to kill from a distance,
'softly', because it's embarrassing the way people behave when they
realise they are going to die. It marks a sort of embarrassment of
his own, not so much at his job, but at the fact that his job is
necessary. In Higgins' world, Cogan's job is necessary because
although the world has its rules, they are honoured in their breach; that is exactly the way the world works. In Dominick's version,
the world doesn't really work. This leads him to surround the story
with reminders of the world we are living in, mostly shown on TVs
running in the background,with Barack Obama, Shrub Bush, or 'Hank'
Paulson illustrating disaster and break-down in the 'real' world outside. It
culminates with a shut-down speech by Cogan (as played by Brad Pitt)
to the mob lawyer played by Richard Jenkins. On the surface, it is
the most prefect Higgins scene, because Jenkins' character is
actually the one who best reflects Higgins' world, the one character
in this film who could have fit comfortably into Eddie Coyle. Pitt's
lecture, however, seems to have been lifted from Howard Zinn, or maybe
Oliver Stone or James Ellroy, about how corruption and cheating are
at the heart of America; it sure doesn't come from Higgins. Higgins
understood that rules are honoured in their breach, and that the real
world functions (or perhaps functioned, before the focus of 24/7 TV)
in those breaches. It's why many of his best books work in the areas
where people make the corruption work, or illustrate to the naïve
how it can work.

Dominik's interest is
an outgrowth of his earlier film, of Ron Carlson's The Assassination
Of Jesse James, which also starred Pitt, and was primarily about the
rise of celebrity, and the demands it puts on would-be heroes. Pitt's
Cogan is suitably non-heroic when he needs to be—there's an
excellent scene in which he explains to one of the doomed hoods that
'very few guys know me', but that's undercut by his larger moral
view, and by an extremely awkward introduction set to Johnny Cash's
'The Man Comes Around', which is like being clobbered by a lead
mallet. You can also see echoes of Dominik's signature film,
Chopper, in his fascination with the violent absurdity of
the criminal world—his comic hoods and their scenes of heroin use,
which reminded me of the point-of-view bits in Brother From
Another Planet or bits of Jackie Brown; the whole circus around James Gandolfini, as the
hit man who's lost his nerve; and especially in the wonderful, if
familiar, performance by Ray Liotta, both touching and absurd and
culminating in extreme violence. For Higgins, this world is not
absurd, and its violence rarely shocks in its extremes.

In the end, Killing
Them Softly seduces by catching much of Higgins' tone, by casting
good actors who make the most of the roles, and by refusing to 'blow
up' the story. But if it catches the tone, it misses much of the
point, without making a better one of its own.

One footnote: a
number of essays about the film remarked that The Friends Of Eddie
Coyle was not only Higgins' first novel, but also his best, as if
this were some kind of curse and also an explanation for his lack of
pick-up by Hollywood. Eddie Coyle is, as I have suggested many times before, a
small and perfect book, but not necessarily Higgins' best. Because
his style, although refined, remained the same, and remained the
inevitable talking-point in reviews, and because he wrote 26 novels,
portraying a world that was starting to change, his books received less and less attention as his career continued. In fact, you could look at Killing Them Softly as reflecting the realisation that the world has changed.

But I would argue
particularly that The Mandeville Talent (you can link to the
IT essay on that book here) is a subtler version of the same idea, dealing with murder
and white-collar crime, while a number of his last novels, especially A
Change Of Gravity and At End Of Day, are elegant
reflections of his world-view in changing times. Higgins is always worth a read, and this film is certainly worth your time as well.

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